Meet the man who travelled 30,000 miles chronicling pickup hockey in Canada
On a Tuesday morning at a diner in Richmond Hill, Ont., Ronnie Shuker sat down with Daily Faceoff for an in-depth interview on his book The Country and the Game: 30,000 Miles of Hockey Stories. Shuker, an author, editor and an editor-at-large for The Hockey News, went on the journey of a lifetime, traveling coast-to-coast-to-coast and finding pick-up games in every corner of Canada.
Starting his trip as far east of Canada as one could get – in fact, a little too far east, visiting the French territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon – Shuker’s eight-month long expedition saw him share the ice with hundreds of characters, chatting with everyone from former pros to Zamboni drivers and arena staff, to visiting Indigenous communities and seeing how hockey has ingrained itself seamlessly into the culture, to finding super fans, getting personal tours of their man caves and merchandise-decked basements. According to his website, some of the travel stats include more than 100 hotel and motel rooms, 65 tanks of gas, dozens of highways and spotted moose, bison and elk, four airplanes and two bouts of food poisoning. But who’s counting?
Shuker’s experience of traveling the country and getting a front-row seat – or maybe a seat up in the nosebleeds – at lots of games gave him a unique perspective as to what levels and age groups had the most enthusiastic fans, which arenas had the best rink fries or which league was overlooked at how good its hockey was. When asked which hockey environment was the purest, he provided an answer without hesitation.
“I would say the Yukon Native Hockey Tournament in Whitehorse, Yukon,” he said, referring to the annual four-day event that sees dozens of teams from Yukon, Northwest Territories (N.W.T.), Alberta and B.C. “I was sort of forewarned about this, because I had talked to a bunch of people before I went, who said it was going to be packed. The parking lot was overflowing, and the line down the street was easily a mile long.”
He said it felt like at least half of Whitehorse’s 28,000-plus residents were in Takhini Arena, despite its capacity being listed as just more than 1,500. Whatever the final attendance was for games, it was a lot higher than 1,500.
“The support for that was incredible. It didn’t matter what level, and whether it was the highest level of the men’s or women’s division, the fans were rabid and wild. It was a great hometown atmosphere,” he said.
One of the major plot points in the book takes place in northern Ontario, as Shuker attempts to visit the wreckage site where Bill Barilko and Henry Hudson crashed their plane while on a fishing trip. Barilko was the Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman who scored the Stanley Cup-winning overtime goal in the 1951 Final, then died three months later in the crash. Due to the remoteness of the crash site, Barilko and Hudson weren’t found for more than 11 years, during which the Leafs were unable to win the Cup.
Having read everything he could and becoming more consumed with the subject, Shuker makes it a priority to visit Barilko’s hometown of Timmins, Ont. During our interview, he explained the step-by-step process of how he planned to visit the site, as well as the countless interviews and in-home visits he made during his time up there. We won’t spoil the details, as we highly encourage you to find a copy and read it, but Shuker did go on to talk about how Barilko’s story is rarely discussed beyond The Tragically Hip song Fifty-Mission Cap. He references Hip bassist Gord Sinclair, who said Canadians don’t talk about their own mythology very much.
“I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, we made so much of the Hip for telling Canadian stories like it’s such a novelty. And I guess it is, since most bands don’t do that, but the Hip did,” he said. “I think it speaks to the way our culture is, how we just don’t tell our own stories very well.”
When asked about what common theme he came across when traveling across the country, Shuker paused and gave the answer some thought, cycling through the scores of interactions he had through the trip.
“I guess I would say the cachet of being a hockey player,” he said, adding that he’s “not a hockey player: I play hockey, but I’m not a hockey player, in terms of a profession. But I know I’m in his informal club, where I play hockey and others play it, or watch it, and you immediately have a connection.
“It gets you in the door with people you might have nothing in common with,” he continued. “I have a lot of hockey friends I have zero in common with besides hockey, but because we share this game, we’re friends and we can sit for three hours and watch a game, or sit in a dressing room for half an hour before the game and for half an hour afterwards.”
Shuker, arms folded and looking up at the diner’s roof, reflected on the game’s place in the country, saying hockey is one of the few things Canadians can point to if they ever feel insecure about their place in the world. He added how amazed he was, and still is, at how easy it was to talk to people throughout his months-long journey.
“There was no schtick to the book, right? There was no gimmick. I wasn’t trying to play hockey in every province – I wanted to, but it wasn’t a schtick to the book. I wasn’t trying to do it in ‘X’ number of days or provinces,” Shuker said. “It was literally just me getting in my car, drive, go watch and talk and play hockey across the country. It was really simple as that.”
When you read enough books on sports, you can identify the author’s relationship with the game they’re writing about. Some write with the background of a newspaper scribe who covered the beat for decades; some look at it with fresh eyes, never watching the game but applying their journalistic skills and looking under every rock for details to write on. Some understand the game, but miss the forest for the trees and provide the reader with a truncated view on the subject matter.
Then there’s writers like Shuker, whose love and respect for the game and those who play and watch is felt in the ink spilled on page after page. His admiration for hockey goes beyond who should be on the Maple Leafs’ power play or why the current NHL Stanley Cup playoff alignment is terrible: it’s a desire to see what a junior game in the middle of the Canadian Prairies looks like, how a small town rallies around a beer league game among husbands and fathers on a Sunday night, or whose parents cheer loudest at a pee wee tournament in the Maritimes.
Right before the server brought us our bills, Shuker shared an anecdote of pulling into Moose Factory, Ont., home of former NHL and 2005-06 Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy winner Jonathan Cheechoo. The reflection serves as a perfect microcosm of The Country and the Game, of how a town with a population of fewer than 2,500, in a remote area of the country where snow pants don’t go back in the closet until May, will drop everything on a moment’s notice to help a stranger and if there’s time, talk a little hockey. This time, the stranger was Charlie Cheechoo, who served as deputy chief of the Moose Cree First Nation and called himself “Mr. Hockey Moose Factory.”
“I had no interview set up, I just showed up at the arena and asked, ‘Who can I talk to about hockey in Moose Factory?’ (Charlie) showed up less than five minutes later, in minus-49 degree weather while wearing a snowmobile suit.”
It’s an example of how big a part hockey plays in the lives of millions of Canadians.
“It’s just this little club anybody can join.”
You can find The Country and the Game: 30,000 Miles of Hockey Stories on Amazon, Indigo and your local bookstore.
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